No. I don't use vi, but it at least has some basic functionality. It's not scriptable, so it's not good for really serious use, but it can get simple jobs done in a pinch, unlike most other so-called text editors (EDIT, Notepad, SimpleText, TPU, ...).

i assure you, not only is vi scriptable, it's really good for serious use. and if you use a buff version like vim you can even have a Perl interpreter inside your editor.

i remeber converting a shell script to Perl once while someone was watching.

Is it scriptable, really? I've never seen anyone claim
that vim was fully scriptable before. I know about the
Perl embedding (which is indeed cool, since there are
(a small handful of) things Perl makes significantly
easier than elisp), but maybe we're stumbling over the
definition of scriptable.

When I say scriptable, I mean that every action is
scriptable. I'm not talking about giving the user
the ability to create scripts and then call them at
will (that's more like what I call macro facility),
but the ability to completely rewrite the editor's
behavior in arbitrary circumstances. So, for example,
in a truly scriptable editor, I can create a mode
just for quizzing questions, and I can set that mode
up so that when I type a question in and finish up
with a question mark that causes my function
(quizques-electric-question-mark or somesuch) to be
called, which can do whatever it likes (insert some
additional stuff, move the cursor around, save the
file, refactor the indentation, whatever). Similarly,
given an arbitrary computer language (a new one, say),
someone could create a mode that does not just syntax
highlighting and indentation but also actively helps
the author write -- something like cperl-mode.
Every keypress has to be fully scriptable.

If I'm mistaken, and vim is indeed scriptable to that
degree, then I've been putting off learning it for too
long. (Not that I can really switch, given the amount
of custom elisp I have that I'd have to translate, but
if it's as flexible as you say I'd like to learn it as
a second editor.) But though I've seen a lot of vim
advocacy, that's a claim I've never seen before. Can
you point me in the direction of some documentation
that explains how to do it, the vim equivalent of the
Gnu Emacs Lisp Reference Manual? If this is really
true, it excites me considerably, and I would stop
putting it off and learn vim this spring.

But I suspect that you misunderstood me, because if
vim could really do that stuff I'd think some of
the people who are really into vim would have written
command shells and spreadsheets and mail/news clients
and web browsers and z-machine emulators whatnot for
it, like the Emacs people have done.

and i remember back in decades past that there were macros that could create and solve a maze. i simply assume that vim is Turing Complete and if you liked you could make it do whatever you wanted. but it might be like programming in brainf*ck.

it also does syntax-highlighting on the fly as i type
so it could probably do any other work on the fly as well.

my whole take on the emacs thing is you don't have an editor with a scripting language, you have a scripting language with an editor module as the default interface. the web-browser is written in lisp and uses the editor module for input/output. =P

i'm still not a vim power user by any means, but i've noticed that when i 'vim a_directory'
it pops up in a dired like mode.

That's not what I asked. I had a DOS-based editor
that did that fifteen years ago, and it didn't even
have macro facilities, much less was scriptable.

and i remember back in decades past that there were macros that could create and solve a maze. i simply assume that vim is Turing Complete

That's not what I asked, either. In fact, I think I
specifically said that a macro facility, however
advanced, is not the same thing as being
fully scriptable. If I have to stop my editing and
do something else special in order to invoke the
macros... my keyboard can do (a limited amount of)
that on its own, irrespective of what editor I am
using. But that's not enough for serious use.
I need the editor itself to be scriptable, meaning
that I can script arbitrary things to happen as a
natural part of the editing process. Have you ever
seen cperl-mode in action, for example? I type
while <FOO and get the following:

More usefully, I have my own custom stuff for editing
CGI scripts. It uses cperl-mode but does some extra
things on its own, such as automatically inserting
close tags when I put in open tags (in strings), to
ensure wellformed XHTML. (It also has a lot of very
site-specific stuff in it too.)

it also does syntax-highlighting on the fly

A lot of editors do syntax highlighting without being
anything that resembles scriptable.

my whole take on the emacs thing is you don't have an editor with a scripting language, you have a scripting language with an editor module as the default interface.

I suppose that's a fair enough description of it.
It's an approach that creates a lot of flexibility
and power.

Ada Lovelace for the palindrome
Albert Einstein for having smelly feet
Alfred Nobel for his contribution to battlefield science
Burkhard Heim for providing the missing link between science and mysticism
Claude Shannnon for riding a unicycle at night at MIT
Donald Knuth for being such a great organist
Edward Teller for being the template for Dr. Strangelove
Edwin Hubble for pretending to be a pipe-smoking English gentleman
Erwin Schrödinger for cruelty to cats
Hedy Lamarr for weaponizing pianos
Hugh Everett for immortality, especially for cats
Isaac Newton for his occult studies
Kikunae Ikeda for discovering the secrets of soy sauce
Larry Wall for his website
Louis Camille Maillard for discovering why steaks taste good
Marie Curie for the shiny stuff
Nikola Tesla for the cool cars
Paul Dirac for speaking one word per hour when socializing
Richard Feynman for his bongo skills
Robert Oppenheimer for his in-depth knowledge of the Bhagavad Gita
Rusi P Taleyarkhan for Cold Fusion
Sigmund Freud for his Ménage ā trois
Theodor W Adorno for his contribution to the reception of jazz
Wilhelm Röntgen for the foundations of body scanners
Yulii Borisovich Khariton for the Tsar Bomba
Other (please explain why)